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Eggs-actly !

Just what I’ve been waiting for…a partner in crime. Well, some people think it’s criminal to waste spend time doing projects, but surely not Saintnot in my family no one I know!

Meet Elle. She’s the daughter of our son’s fiance, so she and her two beautiful sisters will soon be our bonus granddaughters. Elle came to spend some time with us, yesterday, and we enjoyed loved having her here. It was the perfect time to try out some old and new ideas for Easter.
I pulled the string egg project out of my old teacher bag, having made those with first graders for years, but I knew Elle wouldn’t be there long enough for the overnight drying time, so I wrapped them ahead of time and gave the glue time to dry. She popped the balloon and pulled it through the string and we put those aside in favor of dying and decorating eggs. In this picture, she is wrapping a turmeric dyed egg in rubber bands to submerge in another color. I read about using Kool-Aid to dye eggs here. Elle loved the smell, and I loved that it was less messy than traditional dyes (and way less smelly than the natural dyes of red cabbage and onion skins that I stunk up the school with used one year.) We loved the texture of the Kool-Aid dyed eggs. Don’t you love how she concentrates? We take eggs very seriously.
Next, we tried a process I read about in several places on Pinterest. The directions suggested shaving crayons and rolling hot eggs around in the wax. Wow! Did we have fun with that. And that Elle…she’s a smart one. She decided that the tongs I used to remove the eggs would be perfect for rolling the eggs around. Just after we both burned our fingers a little bit.
These eggs turned out great, but I’m still scraping crayon shavings off the floor. I get a littlelot messy. I found that simply coloring on the hot eggs worked fairly well; not as pretty and random as the shavings, but after some thought, next year I will break up some crayons into a baggie, add a hot egg, and, using a kitchen towel to prevent burns, move the egg around to coat.

Some cooking had to be involved in our project night, so we tried this bhttp://taste-for-adventure.tablespoon.com/2012/04/01/creative-cooking-for-easter/?nicam1=CONTENT_PPC&nichn1=OUTBRAIN&nipkw1={ad_title}&niseg1=TBSP_TRAFFIClog’s idea to make cookie baskets.
We may or may not have eaten a piecea few pieces a bag of candy eggs during the process. And, did I tell you what multi-taskers we are? While we were waiting for the cookies to bake, we worked on our T shirt project…another Pinterest idea, but we put our own spin on it.
To do this project, all you need is a solid colored T shirt, bleach, a paint brush or Q tips, and a way to make a design. Since this was our first, we opted for a stencil. By sliding the T shirt over a styrofoam lid, we were able to secure the stencil, load the Q tip with bleach and “paint the bleach on the fabric. We got a couple of letters too close together, but hey, it was our first time, and we are about the process and not the product. We do kind of like the product, though, and we may try a different method later.

Saint was getting hungry, smelling those cookies baking, so we took a break for Frito Pies. This is a camping staple for us and, since we had planned to camp this weekend before the weather changed, I thought it would be perfect. Elle had eaten Frito Pie before, but never out of the bag. To my surprise, Saint had not had one from the bag, either. Where was he in the sixties??
And then onto the science projects. Elle had seen or heard of someone putting Peeps in the microwave with toothpicks and letting them “sword fight.”
They both lost!
Elle had seen this on a video or TV show, but had never done it, so we sucked the egg into the bottle…and even got it out again in one piece. SUCCESS! We can’t say the same for the cut out sugar cookies on the pan, can we? The bunny, butterfly, and flowers are a little distorted unrecognizable. Oh, well, they still have the same amount of calories, right? And what’s one little failure in the grand scheme of the evening?
Elle treated Saint and me to several of her “routines,” which we thoroughly enjoyed.
And, I don’t know about Elle, but I am looking forward to another project night really soon.